Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Yesterday (less than two weeks after our Ron Paul-themed
inaugural Williamsburg gathering of the Dionysium), Ron Paul’s home state of
Texas (also home to the other branch of the Dionysium)
gave Romney the remaining delegates he needs to pass 1,144 and be the
Republican nominee (endless formalities and an August national convention aside,
etc., etc., I know, I know).

I wouldn’t blame libertarians for being uncertain about what
to do next: urge people to vote for Gary
Johnson (my plan), just stick with Paul for symbolic/educational purposes
(or in hopes of some last-minute miracle), suck it up and vote for Romney (or
Obama), or stay home in November (while focusing on the long term).

But the Dionysium, under my courageous leadership, will turn its attention to other topics.

And thus: my online presence will now become less partisan
and more dialogue-facilitating (watch me mellow) and some technical bells and
whistles will change in the process. The
timing may be just as well, since four axes oft-ground on this blog over the
past six years reached small logical culminations on the night prior to this month’s Dionysium, when,
at another NYC event for Paul-chronicling
author Brian Doherty, all these
things happened:

•MUSIC: Hey,
finally partied with Kennedy after two decades of admiring the MTV VJ turned
libertarian radio host. She may be Christian,
but then, I’ve never denied that beliefs I disagree with can inspire good
things. I applaud Julian Cope’s very literal (and
clever) cover of Roky Erickson’s “I Have Always Been Here Before,” for
instance, even though neo-pagan Cope plainly injected into the original, simple
song his belief that modern-day people have been reincarnated from Druids or
something.

•SCI-FI: Fellow
anarchist-atheist Michael Malice lamented the state of the revamped DC
Universe, which we both know matters more than government or philosophy in the
end. Best I look away from it.

•SCIENCE: I
learned that my eight years at ACSH helped
inspire at least one woman I know to quit smoking, which is a start. If I can save the other 7 billion people on
the planet from death, Thanos loses.

•POLITICS: I saw
a crowd full of people respectful of the Ron Paul phenomenon honor Doherty, an
author who’s enough of a historian – and weirdo – to know that liberty is a far
bigger and more long-lasting cause than any one man.

One hates to sound like a giddy optimist, but it may be safe
now, with the simultaneous Ron Paul and Gary Johnson campaigns going on, to
start talking about

Thursday, May 24, 2012

It is hard to make the case that the Occupy Wall Street
movement is fully reasonable, I think, given some of their strange ideas about
economics and their strange behavior – yet they are tolerated. It’s worth noting there has been fighting,
vandalism, rape, and even a shot taken at
the White House amidst the Occupants’ activities. You have to doubt any of this would have been
tolerated if the Tea Party did it. (Judith
Weiss pointed out a recent National
Review article about the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s complete lack of interest in violence among
the Occupants.)

Careful observers will notice I deploy the same cowboy hat
and “V Guy” mask I wore at the beginning of last week’s Dionysium event in
Williamsburg (of which I hope our videographer will have footage next week that
I can link).

I don’t always talk to Occupy radicals and anarchists,
though, and you can also see a photo nearby (by Doug DeMark) of me at this month’s
conservative-filled Phillips Foundation gathering (flanked by Rachel Currie and
Laura Vanderkam), and tonight at 7:45pm I’ll attend NYPD terror-tracker Hannah
Meyers’ album release party at Fontana’s (admittedly after a quick 7pm stop at
King’s Head Tavern to see a bunch of anarcho-capitalists). I’m thanked in her liner notes.

And speaking of liner notes, it looks like the most prolific
female writer of album liner notes, Dawn Eden, will join Hannah onstage at our
next Dionysium (June 21, 8pm, in Williamsburg) – but Dawn is by some measures
even more conservative than Hannah and instead of rocking will in this case be
discussing her new book My Peace I Give
You about the Catholic saints and psychological healing. More soon.

•••

I think I can safely say I have some handle on how the
Occupants actually think after the dialogue above, a few trips to Zuccotti
Park, and reading issues of the journal n+1’s
spun-off Occupy! Gazette, plus the
essay collection Occupy! from Verso
Books, written by numerous Occupants themselves (indeed, I was the one who
likely boosted the book’s sales at the release party by suggesting they make a
prominent “only $5 per copy” sign, which they did).

I’ll take a closer look at the Occupy! anthology below – but first, a final word about
left-anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who is affiliated with the
movement and about whose book Debt I blogged
earlier this month (he is also, by the way, a former Yale anthro colleague
of anarchism-sympathizing James C. Scott, author of Seeing Like a State and the forthcoming Two Cheers for Anarchism).

I have repeatedly complained (including in the CNBC chat
above) that Graeber is not merely opposed to student loan debt or Third World
debt but to all debt-recording, accounting, and in the end even math itself (gotta give him points for
consistency and radicalism, though I assume he’s opposed to points-awarding as
well). I will grant him this: Constant
calculation can make people
cold.

One study suggests that even being a utilitarian (as I am) –
that is, someone who wants to calculate how best to maximize other people’s
happiness – may be

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the past few decades
of political history, it’s that anti-government forces have been far too
polite, all too willing to engage the enemy on its own terms by talking about
what government ought to do under
ideal, philosophy-guided circumstances, as if that were relevant.

On every side and across the political spectrum, humans are
beset by delusional intellectuals singing some variation on the siren song of
acquiescence to government – from the authoritarians, Muslims, and Catholics
cooing like Loki that submission to authority is humanity’s “natural” state, to
the neoconservatives thinking that arguments about government ineptitude and
misbehavior do not apply to the military, to the “liberal-tarians”
condescendingly urging more consistent libertarians to accept just this one wafer-thin bit of the welfare
state and welfare-statist rhetoric so that they (not necessarily us) will
be allowed to eat in faculty lounges, that being Step 1 to human liberation, or
at least a nice benefit for the liberal-tarians.

There will always be plausible-sounding
philosophical arguments for government (especially in academia, which
generates plausible-sounding arguments for everything), but a horrifying look
at what government really does – what it inevitably really is – will always reveal these arguments, these siren songs
(ordered liberty...efficient provision of basic services...social-democratic
engagement...), as complete horseshit.

Government is crime, and talking about its reform is as
deceptive as talking about how to make the Mafia behave nicely. Start from that premise and you will, at long
last, have begun to think about
politics, possibly for the first time in your life.

•••

Luckily, there are books that skip most of the philosophical
arguments (though we do need libertarian ones) and just survey various agencies
of government, cataloguing the disastrous misallocations of resources,
self-serving acts of politicians and regulators, and heartbreak-inducingly
routine squelching of human hope via bureaucracy that are the real day-in and
day-out of government activity, even when it isn’t engaged in outright mass
murder, which of course it often is (100 million dead from socialism alone last
century, and socialists still think they hold the moral high ground).

Two such books that influenced my thinking were P.J.
O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores and
Philip Howard’s The Death of Common
Sense. My ex-boss John Stossel just
released a book about government aptly titled No, They Can’t. Very much in
that vein is Competitive Enterprise Institute vice president Iain Murray’s Stealing
You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You. Read it (read all of these books), then spare
me your next metaphysically-intuited pro-government argument. End the nonsense. End the lies.
End government.

Whether paying for politicians’ expensive office furniture
even in times of purported fiscal crisis, arresting people for clearing debris
after storms without proper permits, or subsidizing failed industries while
imposing surtaxes on innovative ones, government will always tend to do the wrong thing, for the simple reason that it
isn’t the government’s money, isn’t the government’s lost decision-making
power, isn’t the government’s life. If
you encourage it to continue its activities, you aren’t helping and are no
friend of humanity.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The past few weeks have been big for steampunk and superheroes
(and not just because of the great Avengers movie, though that was reason
enough and something I’d waited over thirty years for).

•Somewhere between fantasy and reality, I went to a steampunk fashion show in Brooklyn on
April 29, and you can see my photos from it nearby – including the smiling face
of my purple-haired friend Juliet Brownell, as well as an Alice in
Wonderland-like blonde model who inspired a sensitive, poetically-inclined male
acquaintance of mine to declare, “I’d hit that so hard, whoever pulled me out
would be declared King of England” – I will only say that she reminds me a bit
of Emma, the cute Australian goth from my high school.

(I’ve also included pics from the border between
Hasidic-Williamsburg and hipster-Williamsburg, since I walked that zone after
the fashion show. That pic of sidewalk
eaters is from DuMont Burger, home of the decidedly non-kosher but wonderful
bacon and bourbon milkshake. The
vandalized anti-vandalism sign, by contrast, is from old Lolita Bar.)

Even proudly progressive (and libertarian Canadian) rock
band Rush is releasing a steampunk-themed album, Clockwork Angels, on June 12.

•On an only-slightly more modern note, I’ve concluded that the High Line – the elevated train
track turned recreational walkway on NYC’s west side – looks best if you walk
south on it (my photos of that, also nearby, capture how this walk, old-timey
in theory, instead ends up looking a bit like the futuristic world of Sleeper – and I threw in the Empire
State Building just for the heck of it).

•In other sci-fi-ish news, this month saw DC Comics
reintroduce the multiverse to its
recently-revamped comics, including Earth 23, where, for good or ill, dwells
Grant Morrison’s “President
Superman,” also seen below. Given
the dreamlike nature of that story, I wouldn’t assume we know anything for sure
about the current multiverse aside from the existence of DC’s “main Earth” and
the reconfabulated Earth 2 (from the writer also scheduled to bring us a new
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe miniseries in July) – and this thought
led me to reflect on how long each dominant
DC Earth lasted.

In retrospect (taxonomical quibbles aside), you could argue
that their respective times in the spotlight (each ending with a rewriting of
the cosmos and shift in storytelling focus) break down like so:

It all seems as inevitable in retrospect as the passing of
generations. Time for me to move on.

Then again, now that they’re collecting each series’ first post-2011
story arc into its own trade paperback, one series that sound like it could be
read almost exactly as if nothing had
happened between roughly 1987 and today is Legion of Super-Heroes, which is
once more written by Paul Levitz and (almost) completely ignores the radical cosmic
reboots of the series that occurred (after he left) in 1990, 1994, and 2004 (if
you want to meet him, he’ll be at the 64
Fulton St. branch of Midtown Comics this Friday, May 25, from 3:30-4:30pm).

I suspect they’re even planning to get Keith Giffen back on
it as artist eventually – like nothin’ ever happened, basically. Like Reagan is still president and Duran Duran
is still popular, the way it is in Heaven.

•Less conservative but definitely sci-fi: Edward Bellamy’s novel
Looking Backward, arguably the
most influential American book of the late nineteenth century, whence came this
disturbingly naive quote that echoes to this day: “No man need care for the
morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees to
provide the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of each and every
citizen from the cradle to the grave.”

His equally socialist brother created the state-idolizing Pledge of Allegiance, by the way, so
think of that before the next time you get all dewy with patriotism,
conservatives.

•Also below (in photos that are not mine but are awesome): a
coffee ad with Admiral Ackbar and
(as pointed out by Drew Rushford) the Bat
Vader costume. The world can’t be
all bad.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Today’s the day: the definitive book on Ron Paul, Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the
Movement He Inspired, is out – and I’ll
host a talk with the author, Brian Doherty (as well as audience members
representing various factions of the libertarian movement) live and in person at the Dionysium THIS THURSDAY, MAY 17 (8pm) at 2
Havemeyer St. in Williamsburg (on the second floor, right above the future
site of the bar Muchmore’s). First
subway stop in on the L (Bedford Ave.), you cowardly Manhattanites (then just
walk three blocks east, entering the building through the N. 9th St. side
door).

I. RON PAUL

This is a big week for Paul, who has made public his plan
to, in essence, give up on beating Romney in the popular vote and just see how
many convention delegates he can wrangle.
Ironically, given that Paul has flirted with conspiracy theorists, it’s
tempting to conspiracy-theorize about what his real plan is: Actually try to
get enough delegates to take over the GOP convention in August? Play nice to keep his son Rand in the GOP’s
good graces (maybe even get him on the ticket, which would please me greatly)? Play not
so nice in order to get Rand on the ticket?
Get out of the way so libertarians can migrate to newly-minted
Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson?

But one person who is back
on cue to say Paul is done and good riddens and furthermore don’t read Brian’s
book is (my fellow Phillips Foundation fellow) Jamie Kirchick, who has been
periodically re-revealing to the world, at critical junctures, that Paul
decades ago produced newsletters with a few racist or conspiracist passages –
and who plainly has lost any ability to see Paul, or even the broader
libertarian movement he represents, through any other lens.

But for the sake of argument, let’s ask: What’s so terrible about conspiracy
theories?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a rationalist, skeptic, and man
who notoriously has little patience for assertions made without evidence
(including the claims that there is a God, that government reduces poverty, or
that U.S. military intervention abroad is usually worth it). But given that every candidate, alas, has (or
purports to have) beliefs that are unproven or irrational (Jeremiah Wright,
Mormonism, Keynes, etc., etc.), shouldn’t we perhaps stop judging such things
merely by how “taboo” they are and instead ask what the likely real-world consequences are?

Paul warning about the international elites gathering at the
Bilderberg conferences (as they in fact do) may sound odd, for instance, but we
should be far less frightened of Paul than of, say, an average politician who
claims that the Department of Commerce is a useful thing, even though the
latter claim sounds too boring to be dubbed “crazy.”

II. ALEX JONES

Paul (like my ex-boss Judge Andrew Napolitano) has been
criticized for appearing on the show hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (who
is, like Paul, a

It happens at 2
Havemeyer St. (three blocks east of Bedford Ave., the easily-reached first
subway stop into Williamsburg on the L), on the second floor, directly above the space soon to house the bar
Muchmore’s. Enter through the side door
on N. 9th St.

Though my libertarian views and Brian’s are well known, the Dionysium is a non-partisan crucible of
skeptical analysis and varied entertainments – and Brian has a sense of
humor – so join us even if you are merely bemused by the one remaining
non-Romney candidate for the Republican nomination and want to know whence he
came.

For the already-initiated, though, I will try addressing some
of the tough questions such as “Is it time to jump ship and root for Gary
Johnson or Mitt Romney?” and “Why the conspiracy theories among Paul fans?”

One of the most important topics to the diehard Paul fans,
though – one of interest as well to the CNBC viewers who saw me participate in
an online video panel about Paul, Occupy Wall Street, and other political
matters last week – is:

The Weirdness of
Currency

One reason that, as you may know, I’ve been arguing online with
the so-called “liberal-tarians” is that some of them have now begun encouraging
people to argue in terms of “social justice,” but that term is not merely a
synonym for “concern for the poor.” It
comes with a great deal
of decidedly anti-market, anti-libertarian baggage – it’s precisely the
redistributionist mode in which people who do
not learn economics like to spout off about economic matters, and we are
all poorer for it.

With the possible exception of Marxism, this is about the
last intellectual tradition libertarians should be encouraging if we want to
educate people about economics – a bit like trying to encourage secularism
through immersion in theology, or a free market in labor via the labor theory
of value.

But I will confess that the Ron Paul rhetorical approach to
teaching listeners about economics is not exactly the one I’d pick either. He started out as a gold bug, and for him, as
for some of his biggest fans, all of economics seems to rotate around the distinction
between the Federal Reserve and gold-backed, non-inflating currency. You can describe the economy that way – and
I’m all for a free market in competing currencies – but it’s a highly
idiosyncratic way of introducing people to economics, when most of them haven’t
even tackled such basic concepts as mutually-beneficial exchange (the real key,
in my opinion), property rights, supply and demand, regulation, and so
forth.

Furthermore, I was reminded by David Graeber’s book Debt – which, for all
the negative things I said about it in my blog entry reviewing it, does a nice
job of teasing apart currency’s varied, bundled-together functions – that fiat currency (that is, currency that is
produced by the government and isn’t exchangeable for more basic commodities
the government keeps in storage) isn’t the problem per se, inflation is.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Catch me on CNBC’s Google+ stream as I do a video chat with John Carney and
Occupy Wall Street supporters tomorrow (Thur.) at 4pm Eastern!

And after yesterday’s historic May Day protests, it is time
I examined a few books tied to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Taking the place of my old “Books of the Month,” entries
like this one will henceforth focus on books that may relate to or help enrich the
discussion at that month’s Dionysium, the Dionysium being the new
series of bar events (a varying mix of debates, entertainment, and more) I’ll
be hosting (and moderating!) in Williamsburg – and this being a “Month of Political Crisis” on this
blog and at the Dionysium itself (followed by a June month of Revolution
and Revolutionaries at our sister Dionysium in Austin, TX).

(The Williamsburg action all starts at 8pm on Thursday, May 17, on the residential second floor of 2 Havemeyer
St., the building that will soon house the bar Muchmore’s, three blocks
east of the Bedford Ave. subway stop – first stop into Brooklyn on the L; enter
through the N. 9th St. side door just before you reach Havemeyer. First up is BRIAN DOHERTY discussing his new book on Ron Paul – but today let us examine how the left’s most interesting insurgent
movement thinks.)

•••

The Nietzschean skepticism inherent in the Dionysium demands
the questioning of clichés (as does the
new Jonah Goldberg book out yesterday, by the way). Let us then question the assumption that
Occupy and the Tea Party must be opposites.

I’ve leaned toward the more free-market Tea Party,
obviously, but then, some of my fellow libertarians have lately been arguing
that I should think more in terms of “social justice,” the way the left and
Occupy do (though I was pleased to see Jacob
Levy break ranks with the other liberal-tarians for the interesting reason
that he sees thinkers like Rawls as inviting people to think in closed, nationalistic,
non-cosmopolitan terms – of a single, self-contained society like an idealized
Greek city-state, not coincidentally – and thus to downplay the plight of
immigrants and outsiders).

I readily concede both that the basic concern for the poor
emphasized by the “social justice” crowd is admirable and that Occupy makes some very
good points about unfair corporate bailouts and government-banking
collusion. I will even concede that
radically-skewed wealth distribution can be a warning sign (though not necessarily a sign of excessively free-market rules).

On the other hand, having a few good points doesn’t entirely
absolve Occupy of the (admittedly shallow) charges made by their critics that
they’re a bunch of scruffy, trespassing, Marxist loonies. Many are.
Check out Gerard Perry’s tweets
from May 1 for a bit of Zuccotti flavor.
A related photo essay (one in a series Gerard’s done about Occupy) is
forthcoming on his site American-Rattlesnake.

Somewhere between the mundane, true points the movement
makes and the scruffy schizophrenics sleeping in the street in the name of that
movement lie the intelligent – but still sometimes bizarre – intellectuals who guide
the movement, and it’s mostly them I want to talk about today (and perhaps
tomorrow on Google+’s CNBC stream at 4pm Eastern, of course!).

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

I don’t know how many of the protesters at Occupy rallies
have read Debt by left-anarchist
anthropologist David Graeber, but he was purportedly instrumental in guiding
them toward their quasi-leaderless, General Assembly-forming,
amorphously-collective, ambiguously-agendaed system.

Graeber is full of interesting tidbits about how the
accounting of debts and the use of currency arose in real history instead of
the imagined/deduced scenarios of economists (as with most of history, the real
story seems to have been strange, messy, brutal, and not altogether
rational). But that doesn’t make his
political program wise – and if it’s shared by Occupiers in general,
civilization is in big trouble.